Andrew Johnson, who inherited a 300-year-old British estate back in 2001, reflects on the surprising inheritance from his lumber company in Bristol on Jan. 24, 2012. / EMILY McMANAMY, Free Press

Written by

Susan Green, Correspondent

Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands about 100 miles from London.

Given the popularity of “Downton Abbey,” the Emmy Award-winning Masterpiece Classic series that has been airing on Vermont Public Television every Sunday night, there’s renewed interest in how rich Brits once lived in splendor largely thanks to the efforts of their lowly employees. / 2011 Nick Briggs/ITV for MASTERPIECE

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One newspaper in England called Andrew Johnson a “lumberjack.” Another referred to him as a “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

But the 87-year-old Vermont native, who owns and operates a Bristol sawmill, seems to take such comments from the United Kingdom in stride. On a January afternoon at work, he was dressed in a frayed black turtleneck and mud-caked jeans that rendered him the antithesis of a dandy.

The outfit certainly belied his lineage. In the mid-1980s, Johnson was surprised to learn he had been deemed the next male heir of a patrician family: The Harpur-Crewes, successive generations of which lived for three centuries at a palatial home called Calke Abbey in Derbyshire, a county in the East Midlands about 100 miles from London.

At first, the British press assumed that Johnson would inherit the entire estate, now encompassing 600 acres and other buildings in the nearby village of Ticknall. By the time the last surviving English heir in the Harpur-Crewe family died in 1999, however, the main house and most of the surrounding area had been donated to the country’s National Trust in lieu of unpaid property taxes.

The Vermonter’s share of the once-substantial Harpur-Crewe holdings is relatively modest. He receives rent from Ticknall people who live on two small farms and in 70 cottages originally a part of the Calke estate, a legacy that has since been put into a trust for his nine grandchildren. A property manager oversees these ancient dwellings, which are often in dire need of upkeep.

Johnson and his immediate kin have the right to stay in a flat within Calke Abbey itself whenever they travel across the pond. There, they can gaze upon the floor-to-ceiling carved wooden fireplace that features the Harpur-Crewe crest adorned with lions, crosses, an open hand and, for reasons unknown, a wild boar atop a knight’s armored helmet.

Dubbed “the house that time forgot,” the rest of the Calke Abbey is a museum, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Great Britain with signs that read: “Conserve, Not Restore.” This indicates a National Trust agreement to repair but not renovate, thereby spotlighting the faded glory of yesteryear for the general public. In the breathtaking gardens outside, flowers abound, along with 172 varieties of fruits and vegetables. Immense trees have survived since medieval times; Two of the oaks are believed to date back a thousand years. Rare Portland sheep and longhorn cattle graze on the agricultural grounds. Deer roam what’s now a vast nature reserve.

Given the popularity of “Downton Abbey,” the Emmy Award-winning Masterpiece Classic series that has been airing on Vermont Public Television every Sunday night, there’s renewed interest in how rich Brits once lived in splendor largely thanks to the efforts of their lowly employees. In its heyday, Calke Abbey boasted 30 servants in a society with sharp, upstairs-downstairs class distinctions.

Johnson, who’s been to Calke dozens of times in the last 25 years, is not awed by the riches of his ancestors. “It was built on the backs of working people,” he said.

Bird egg collectors

Many characters in “Downton Abbey,” set before, during and after World War I, are a bit daffy. Their idiosyncrasies pale in comparison to those of the Harpur-Crewes, some of whom may have been what we now consider hoarders.

“They were naturalists,” Johnson explained. “Calke Abbey has the second best collection of birds’ eggs in England.”

Thousands of bird eggs, in fact, and taxidermic birds in dioramas. Ken Johnson — one of Andrew’s three sons — and his wife Anne Majusiak created a PowerPoint slideshow with photographs they took at Calke Abbey. Their presentation reveals what the Bristol couple described as a ”cabinet of curiosities,” in which the Harpur-Crewe clan displayed shells, stones, fossils, a crocodile skull brought back from Egypt and even part of a human skull from who knows where.

This hobby started with Sir Vauncey Harpur-Crewe, the tenth baronet (1846-1924) and an avid amateur ornithologist. In days of yore, when a room was bursting at the seams with collected artifacts, the residents supposedly just closed the door and began filling up another. These eerie souvenirs are juxtaposed with fabulous decor: Victorian walnut furniture, oriental rugs, chandeliers, fine china, valuable ceramic vases.

A spectacular canopied “State Bed” was a 1734 wedding present from Queen Caroline, wife of King George II, to Lady Caroline Manners. She tied the knot with the fifth baronet, one of five Sir Henry Harpurs in a span of more than 400 years. Maybe the royal gift didn’t suit her taste. This magnificent piece covered in embroidered Chinese silk never left it’s crate. Once rediscovered, it has been kept in a temperature-and-humidity-controlled glass case, apart from a 1985 voyage across the Atlantic for an exhibit at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC.

The walls of Calke Abbey sport numerous stuffed animal heads, hunting trophies that peer down on visitors along with the portraits of privileged human inhabitants through the ages. Sir Vauncey is in uniform, holding a sword. The chap who preceded him, Sir John Harpur (the ninth baronet, 1824-1886) wears a top hat and appears to be proud of his enormous mutton-chop whiskers; his marriage to Lady Catherine Crewe, also from nobility, is what would provide the family with a hyphenated name thereafter.

An air of mystery and scandal clings to Sir Henry Harpur (1759-1819), known as “the isolated baronet.” He was a recluse who took a lady’s maid, Nanette Hawkins, as his mistress. They ultimately wed, but he remained something of a hermit. A tunnel was dug under the lawn “so the staff would not intrude on his view” from the house, Majusiak said. The help also received their orders in writing from a boss who dreaded direct contact with them.

The desire to withdraw could have been genetic. Several Harpur-Crewe baronets over the years apparently preferred a mostly solitary existence.

100-room manor house

Calke Abbey, which at its peak encompassed 33,000 acres with 500 other structures and 200 farms, was established on the site of a 12th century Augustinian priory disbanded by King Henry VIII in a sweeping nationwide effort in the 1500s to eliminate papal influence.

The subsequent 100-room baroque manor house went up in about 1703 under the guidance of Sir John Harpur — the fourth baronet, a term that signifies a commoner who holds the lowest hereditary title of honor in the spectrum. This ascension had become possible only when an earlier Sir John was knighted by King James I in 1626, reportedly in exchange for a tidy sum.

“They bought their titles for six thousand pounds,” Andrew Johnson said of the Harpurs who later added Crewe to their surname.

Johnson was put off by his cousin Sir Henry Harpur-Crewe when they first met, during the latter’s brief trip to Vermont the 1985. ”We took an instant dislike to each other,” he recalled. “Henry was very impressed with hierarchy. His sister, Airmyne, was a lovely person, but treated as less than a servant by him.”

The contemporary Airmyne, who died in 1999 at age 80, was Airmyne Isabel Marie Harpur-Crewe. An aunt, Airmyne Catherine Harpur-Crewe, had been banished for life from Calke Abbey by her father Sir Vauncey for smoking a cigarette. She shouldn’t have taken it personally; the baronet that Ken Johnson describes as “notoriously unsociable” also banned motor cars and even bicycles from Calke Abbey.

The tobacco health issue aside, Airmyne Catherine’s presumed embrace of modernity is reminiscent of the trajectory for the fictitious young Lady Sybil Crawley, who admires the suffragettes and steals away from Downton Abbey to attend socialist rallies.

The more recent Airmyne at some point played dinner host to the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire (sister of acclaimed author Jessica Mitford), who remembers in her 2010 memoir that the Calke Abbey doyenne’s sole friend was a goose.

“The Harpur-Crewe siblings,” the 91-year-old aristocrat wrote, “were the only true eccentrics I have ever met.”

She sounds almost as loftily sardonic as the tart Dowager Duchess portrayed by Dame Maggie Smith in “Downton Abbey.”

During Andrew Johnson’s visits to Calke Abbey, he’s always more likely to chat with the gardeners than with the upper crust or the media. That may be why journalists dubbed him “the quiet American.”

From England to Vermont

Johnson grew up unaware of his rarefied heritage. His great-grandfather, Ion Turner, was a comparatively poor captain with the 16th Regiment of the Queen’s Lancers who wed the wealthy Caroline Louisa Harpur-Crewe in 1861. They left England with their three offspring when he was posted to India, where nine more kids were born.

Ion retired from the military and relocated his entire brood to Minnesota. A final baby came into the world there. Of the 13 Turner children, Lionel would later have a daughter, Maud, who married Fred Johnson. About seven years after moving to Vermont in 1918, they became the parents of Andrew Johnson.

In contrast with the Turners’ talent for reproduction, the three remaining Harpur-Crewes in the late 20th century never spawned progeny. “It became a remarkably childless family,” suggested Ken Johnson.

“This was a family that simply ran out of steam,” noted Andrew Johnson. “I’m the oldest male great-grandchild of Ion and Caroline Turner. My sister, Ethel Crane, is older than I am but she could not even be considered as an heir.”

Under this gender bias, the female members of any dynasty can inherit an estate only if no guys are around to carry on the blood line.

Women traditionally had limited legal status under the British law of primogeniture, a key plot point in “Downton Abbey,” season two of which concludes tonight. The show’s Robert and Cora Crawley, designated the Earl and Countess of Grantham, have three daughters.The eldest, Lady Mary, seems perfectly capable of managing the estate and probably would in a less repressive era. However, in that timeframe the race is on to find her a husband with proper roots to sustain the continuum; some under consideration are distant cousins, such as the handsome Matthew Crawley.

Fiction imitates life

Forbidden liaisons between the landed gentry and folks from a less exalted gene pool pop up in several episodes, such as when Lady Sybil is wooed by the Irish chauffeur and again when her sister Lady Edith falls for a local farmer. Although class divisions began to crumble during World War I, England may still be waging a battle with snootiness to this day.

In the current season of the show — shot at the splendid Highclere Castle in Newbury, about 100 miles southeast of Derbyshire — parts of the house are occupied by wounded soldiers discharged from hospitals. Majusiak said Calke Abbey did the same during both world wars, which contributed to its physical decline.

The baronetcy became extinct with the death of Sir Vauncey in 1924 in that there were no Harpur-Crewe men left at that juncture. His daughter Frances eventually had sons: Charles and Henry, brothers of the second Airmyne. They all changed their last name from Jenney so they could inherit Calke Abbey when their turns came.

Does Andrew Johnson ever imagine himself as the eleventh baronet of Calke Abbey — not possible for a Yank, no matter how dandy — if the peerage could be resurrected? He acknowledged that the idea had crossed his mind.

“I’d have to move to England and become a British citizen,” said Johnson, who’s planning another Derbyshire vacation this spring. “I spent a month there once and decided that wasn’t for me.”

Had the process appealed to him, would he be called Sir Andrew Harpur-Crewe, perhaps?

“I’d probably just be Sir Old Bastard,” Johnson quipped, reflecting the kind of humor a not-so-quiet American lumberjack might enjoy.